


Pirates!  In a Search for the Source!

by ariadnes_string



Category: Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists! (2012)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-25
Updated: 2012-12-25
Packaged: 2017-11-22 08:47:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,273
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/607982
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ariadnes_string/pseuds/ariadnes_string
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“Captain,” said the Pirate with the Scarf, “you do realize that the Source of the Nile, wherever it might be, is most certainly inland.  What I mean to say is: you can’t get there in a boat.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Pirates!  In a Search for the Source!

**Author's Note:**

  * For [JenNova](https://archiveofourown.org/users/JenNova/gifts).



The Pirate with a Scarf wrapped his scarf more tightly around his mouth and chin. Wool was not the ideal weight for the tropics, but the fabric provided an excellent barrier against mosquitoes. And tsetse flies. And the occasional blood-sucking bat.

Ahead of him, the tri-cornered hat of the Pirate Captain swayed from side to side with the gait of the water buffalo he was riding. Below him squelched the mud of the mangrove swamp. From every side emanated a clicking that was either the snapping claws of the crabs native to the region or the signals of hostile tribesmen stalking their next meal.

He tried to remember how they’d ended up so far from the sea.

+++

It had all started when they plucked a strange, saturnine man from the sea. He was dressed in the robes of an Arab but spoke with the accent of an English gentleman.

He had told them many tales of his adventures, but the Pirate Crew had been most interested in the illustrations of a book he claimed to have translated from the Hindi. They had passed it around, holding it at different angles and squinting at the pictures.

“I’ve been to brothels on seven continents,” the Pirate with Gout had said. “I’ve met a Sarah, a Sadie and a Sally Ann. But I’ve never met a Sutra, Kama or otherwise. He’s having us on.”

“Give me that,” the Pirate with a Scarf had said, confiscating the book before things got out of hand.

The Surprisingly Cuvaceous Pirate had seemed most fascinated by the man himself. “Tell us again how you got that scar?” he’d said, in his surprisingly breathy voice.

“It was in Berberra,” the man had replied, in his less than humble way. “We were set upon by Somali warriors, and—“

“Yes, yes,” the Pirate Captain had interrupted. “One measly through-and-through with a javelin and you're an adventurer. Please. When you’ve been stuck with a true pirate pike, perhaps _two_ , then we can talk.”

But after they’d dropped the man, who said he was expected at a very important debate at the Royal Geographical Society, off in Bristol, it appeared he’d made a deeper impression on the Pirate Captain than the Pirate with a Scarf had imagined.

“The Nile,” the Pirate Captain had mused, with a dangerously dreamy look in his eyes. “That’s the ticket. Plunder is so old hat. It’s all exploration these days, Number Two: mapping, surveying, naming stuff.”

“Captain,” the Pirate with the Scarf had interjected, hoping to nip this mad quest in the bud. “You do realize that the Source of the Nile, wherever it might be, is most certainly inland. What I mean to say is: you can’t get there in a boat.”

“Precisely,” said the Pirate Captain. And the Pirate with a Scarf had known they were done for.

+++

The clicking sounds had turned out not to be crabs. 

The good news about this was that the tribesmen had rescued them from the quicksand that had sucked down the water buffaloes along with most of their supplies. The bad news was that said tribesmen, who were entirely naked except for elaborate sheaths covering their John Thomases, were admiring the Pirate Captain’s head with what the Pirate with a Scarf suspected was more gustatory than sartorial interest.

The Pirate Captain accepted this attention with his usual modesty. “Well,” he said, as one of the natives held an iron pot next to his head as if comparing sizes. “One cannot usually grow a beard this luxuriant unless it runs in one’s family. My maternal grandfather, for instance, had the most luxuriant beard in Suffolk in the reign of the last of the Georges.” 

“Captain,” said the Pirate with the Scarf, unwilling to give offense to their hosts. “I believe these kind gentlemen are considering employing parts of your anatomy in a ritual that will reinforce the established cosmogony of their tribe.”

“Eh?” said the Pirate Captain.

“I suspect, though I may be wrong, that they believe that your beard, and the, erm, parts of your musculature to which it is attached, will be useful to them in maintaining the hierarchy of their community.”

“Come again?”

“Sir!” said the Pirate with a Scarf more forcefully, and gestured with his chin—the only part of his body free from the ropes with which he and his captain were bound—toward the roaring fire, the iron pot, and the knife being sharpened by a young man with a particularly elaborate penis sheath.

“Well why didn’t you say so, Number Two?” roared the Pirate Captain, who then burst free from his bonds with a mighty heave and secured their escape by knocking together the heads of those who had sought to hunt his own.

+++

Which is how the Pirate with a Scarf found himself sharing a narrow dugout canoe with his captain as they shot the rapids of a raging river that was most certainly not the Nile.

He longed for the rest of the Pirate Crew. But the Pirate with Gout and the Albino Pirate had succumbed to malaria and sleeping sickness respectively, and had been left behind to recuperate in Zanzibar. Polly had begun to molt in the Port Aden and had been taken into the care of the sympathetic Royal Consul. And they had not seen The Surprisingly Curvaceous Pirate since he had fallen under the sway of a group of Masai Warriors at the beginning of their quest.

And so The Pirate Captain and the Pirate with a Scarf were quite alone when they escaped the rapids and moored their dugout on the banks of the unnamed river surrounded by impenetrable equatorial jungle.

“Time for tea, I think,” said the gallant Captain, flipping over the dugout to form a table. He produced a thermos from one pocket and a slightly dented tin of biscuits from the other.

They sat in companionable, if slightly melancholy, silence as they munched their biscuits and shared their single tea cup, bending to rinse it in the rising waters of the unnamed river between turns.

“I long for the salt air, Number Two,” said the Pirate Captain, popping the last crumb into his mouth.

The Pirate with a Scarf could only nod wordlessly. He listened to the howls of the monkeys and wished he could hear the cry of gulls one last time.

“But we are lost, I fear, as so many intrepid explorers before us,” said the Pirate Captain mournfully. “Enormous spiders shall eat our bodies, and ants shall make their homes in our forgotten hats.” 

The Pirate with a Scarf was about to question his Captain’s entomological acumen when there was a rustling in the impenetrable jungle.

They both stood, ready to meet their doom.

“Pirate Captain, I presume?” said the unmistakable voice of Black Bellamy.

“Bellamy, you old devil,” cried the Captain, moving from despair to joy in the blink of an eye. “How come you here?”

“Came up the main trade route, same as yourself I suppose,” said the rival pirate. “Though if this is what they call an oasis, I feel sorry for them, I really do.”

The Pirate Captain and the Pirate with a Scarf looked at each other, and then into the jungle from whence Black Bellamy had come. On closer inspection, it proved not so impenetrable after all. Indeed, they could hear the distinct sounds of convivial revelry through the trees.

“Well,” said Black Bellamy, “Are you two coming or not? First round’s on you, anyway—you still owe me from last year.”

And with a shrug, the two intrepid, if thirsty, explorers followed him towards the grog.

**Author's Note:**

> a/n: with apologies to Sir Richard Francis Burton, Henry Morton Stanley, Sandy Wollaston (whose anecdote about washing dishes in a rising river is included in Wade Davis's _Into the Silence: The Great War, Mallory and the Conquest of Everest_ ), and to the entire continent of Africa.


End file.
